Development of an electronic ballast for 250 W HPS lamps

Electronic ballasts have received great attention in recent years because of their merits of light weight, small size, high efficiency and long lamp life, compared to conventional magnetic ballasts. High pressure sodium (HPS) lamps require a much higher igniting voltage to ionize the gas during the start and then appropriate lamp current for transition from glow discharge to a stable high-pressure arc. This paper proposes a single-stage electronic ballast for 250 W HPS lamps. A new ignition method is introduced which greatly improves the HPS lamp lifetime by minimizing the number of high voltage ignition pulse. The good agreements between simulation and experiment results have verified the proposed electronic ballast for 250 W HPS lamps